Gerda Stevenson plays Greta, a woman whose curiosity for the world is compromised and enriched by domesticity – “I have to have both”, she insists to an artist friend. Greta’s story is framed by the musings of her conflicted daughter Barbara, played by Celia Imrie, who pines for her mother even as she struggles to understand her death. “Forget I’m my mother’s daughter. I’m me” insists Barbara, yet she sounds unconvinced by herself. For such an airy film, Blue Black Permanent is full of tensions: between the incuriosity of men and the care of women, the urban tension of Edinburgh and the ease of Orkney, the white cube gallery and the art of living itself. These oppositions reach an apex in the film’s final third, in which Tait’s everyday surrealism takes on a surprising urgency as it is revealed that Greta’s death was a suicide. We follow Barbara into a nightclub as she cries, the full force of the film’s subtle unravelling bursting onto the screen. Few films, save for maybe Claire Denis' Beau travail, capture the mixed emotion of the club so effectively.

Like the films she made, Margaret Tait’s life was quietly remarkable. Born in Orkney, she studied medicine at Edinburgh University, serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a doctor across India, Sri Lanka and Malaya. She then moved to Rome, studying film under the neorealists, before returning to Scotland where she wrote poetry and directed short films. Blue Black Permanent has its roots in A Portrait of Ga, a short she completed four decades earlier. Tait observes her mother across four minutes, in which she appears contemplative, cheerful, forlorn, wearing the face of someone who has experienced life in all its complications, yet for whom a task as simple as unwrapping a sweet becomes worthy of rapture. As she climbs a windy hill, we witness the younger Tait resist the urge to romanticise her strength: she is merely bearing witness, letting life create the poetry.